To manufacture a tire, a green tire is produced which comprises a tire casing made up of rubber. At this stage, the rubber displays broadly plastic behaviour. In order for the material to become elastic, it needs to be vulcanized in a curing press. Given the weight of the green tire and the broadly plastic nature of the material of which it is made, the operation of loading the green tire into the press is a particularly tricky one. To do it, use is made of a device known as a gripper which has hooks. When the green tire is in a horizontal position, the hooks grasp the tire casing via its upper inside diameter in the region of the upper bead. Once the tire casing has been grasped, the gripper introduces the green tire into the curing press so that an inflatable bladder can be deployed inside the tire casing. The bladder then supports the weight of the tire casing and the gripper can withdraw the hooks. It therefore retracts and the press closes so that the operation of vulcanizing the tire casing can begin. Once the tire casing has been vulcanized, a special-purpose gripper extracts it from the press by grasping it via the upper bead using hooks and removes the tire. This extraction operation is not as tricky as the operation of introducing into the mould press because the tire no longer has the plasticity that characterized the material prior to vulcanizing.
However, this technique of grasping the tire casing in order to introduce it into the press has a number of disadvantages. Specifically, the withdrawal of the hooks once the tire casing has been introduced into the press involves pushing down on the top of the bladder which lies in the withdrawal path of the hooks. Now, that can impair the geometry of the tire casing. Further, one of the hooks can sometimes become wedged between the tire casing and the bladder.